Scientific project

LISAH's research is on the systemic analysis of the complex functioning of cultivated landscapes. It focuses on the interactions between plant production and natural resources (soil, water), on surfaces hosting multiple actors and multiple objects (agricultural plots and landscape infrastructures), and along the critical zone (from the surface water table to the lower atmosphere).

The major scientific challenge of the lab is to understand and model the relationships, interactions and even feedbacks between biophysical (i.e. hydrological, biogeochemical, ecological) processes and landscape properties, whether "natural" (soil, relief) or related to human activity (mosaic of cropping systems, hydro-agricultural infrastructure networks, etc).

The main aim of the laboratory is to integrate and compare 3 main families of functions expected from the cultivated landscapes (production and distribution of blue and green water (for plant production), conservation of soil resources, regulation of contaminant ecodynamics).

To this end, the LISAH lab studies i) biophysical mechanisms and their formalisation, at elementary (e.g. soil column) and aggregated (landscape, watershed) scales, ii) the effect of of anthropogenic and climatic forcing structure on flows within landscape and on the spatial dynamics of the landscape for which, iii) the lab also develops spatial characterisation and monitoring methods.

Our research is therefore based on the idea that the analysis of landscape functioning requires simultaneous advances in i) the understanding the abiotic and biotic mechanisms occurring in landscapes, which can only occur over long periods of time, and ii) the explicit (numerical) representation of the geometry and properties of cultivated environments that are highly anthropogenic forced.
    

• The ORE OMERE, an observatory co-leaded by LISAH lab dedicated to the acquisition of long-term agro-hydropedological observations, enables the analysis of the processes studied by the teams, their modelling, and the analysis of the long-term evolution of natural resources (water, soil, etc.) under the effect of climate variability and land-use changes.
• Landscape modeling and numerical simulation spatially explicit are developed both to represent the biotic/abiotic mechanisms and to represent the geometry, topology and properties of cultivated landscapes. These approaches are developed with the support of the engineering team in charge of developing a platform (OpenFLUID) that capitalizes on the development of the elementary models of the lab and its partners, their coupling and their extrapolation.

LISAH's scientific project addresses the frequently conflicting issues concerning soil, water and agricultural production (SDG 2, 6, 14, 15) and for multi-actor spatial extent while maintaining an explicit representation of the individual management scale. The LISAH lab is a laboratory working on landscape agro-ecology, using the landscape as a potential lever for agro-ecological transition, through the modulation of spatial and temporal organizations of cropping systems and infrastructures, and through the implementation and maintenance of landscape infrastructures (ditches, embankments, etc.), seen as nature-based solutions.